Crowe thanked me for the tea, and I breathed a silent thank you to the craft service guy. I jumped into a motorboat that quickly ferried me across the water tank, where I climbed up a period-accurate ladder. ![]() The chef laughed and said, “I’m guessing he just wants tea.” Embarrassed but determined, I raced to set with a thermos, cups, sugar, and milk. One afternoon, I was told over the walkie-talkie that Russell Crowe wanted an “English breakfast.” Excited to have a task that would bring me closer to the main set, I ran to craft services and requested sausages and beans. The scale of the operation was hard to grasp at first. Russell Crowe in Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Sailors who had been cast for their nautical experience and weathered look had been flown in from around the world, and they needed to go through a boot camp of sorts, to train with swords, canons, and muskets. I checked in and was told I’d oversee getting the background actors to the set. It was a few weeks before filming would begin. At the studios, a replica of the HMS Surprise was mounted on a giant gimbal in a water tank next to the Pacific shore. ![]() ![]() I flew to San Diego, took a taxi to the border, walked across to Mexico, and then took another taxi to Rosarito. Master and Commander was being shot at Fox Baja Studios in Rosarito, Mexico, which James Cameron had built a decade earlier to film Titanic. It always reminded us why we were studying film in the first place and inspired me to hold on to that memory of sitting in a dark theater and thinking that I wanted to spend the rest of my life making movies. At the end of each class, to set up the screening for that evening, he would give a brief summary telling us why this week’s film was a masterpiece of cinema and leave us with his signature sendoff: “Scholars, I’ll see you at the movies!” His enthusiasm was contagious. He also taught generations of undergraduates about the power of cinema. Stout smoked cigars, spoke with a vaguely British accent (even though he was from Columbus), and could never seem to master the VCR when showing clips in class. Todd Stevens, courtesy Matthew Hamachek.)ĭr. He liked to say, “Weir did for rain in The Last Wave what Welles did for snow in Citizen Kane.” The late Dr. In fact, that spring, I’d taken his Cinema Theory course, and our final assignment involved analyzing and writing about Peter Weir’s 1977 film, The Last Wave. When I attended, all of the film studies courses were taught by one professor, Dr. But it was also wonderful because I was 20 years old, a film student, and head-over-heels in love with movies.ĭenison is a small school in Ohio, and it has a very small cinema department. Of course, I quickly discovered being an inexperienced production assistant on a film with a $200 million budget was precisely that – mundane and difficult. Through numerous pestering emails and phone calls, I had assured one of the producers, Todd Arnow, that I was eager and willing to take any job, no matter how mundane or difficult. During the summer between my junior and senior year at Denison University, I was extremely fortunate to work as a production assistant on Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
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